Two podcasts on neuroplasticity

I’ve got some longer things to come, but I wanted to draw attention to two podcasts on neuroplasticity that I found through Scientific American‘s Mind & Brain blog.

The first podcast is Brain Science Podcast #10 Neuroplasticity, a presentation structured around the book, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves, by Sharon Begley. Begley is a science writer for The Wall Street Journal, and she builds the book around a discussion of the effects on the brain of meditation. As a summary of the book describes:

Is it really possible to change the structure and function of the brain, and in so doing alter how we think and feel? The answer is a resounding yes. In late 2004, leading Western scientists joined the Dalai Lama at his home in Dharamsala, India, to address this very question–and in the process brought about a revolution in our understanding of the human mind.

The second is an interview with Dr. Norman Doidge, author of The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. As Ginger Campbell, an emergency physician and the interviewer, describes:

We talk about the obstacles that delayed this important discovery. Dr. Doidge shares the stories of three of the scientists featured in his book: Paul Bach-y-Rita, Edward Taub, and VS Ramachandran. We also talked about how these discoveries might influence both patient care and future research.

I’m new to podcasts as I just bought myself a little iPod shuffle to listen to them on while I work out (and haven’t been doing too much of that with all the physical labour involved in farm-related projects, like building a sandstone wall and getting my veggie garden back under control after it was neglected for three weeks while traveling in the US). Ira Bashkow, an old friend from days with a dissertation reading group at the University of Chicago, suggested it as yet another way to cram information into our aging cortical regions, and I’m looking forward to trying.

The American Reality versus the American Dream

By Daniel Lende 

Bob Herbert, in his editorial The Nightmare Before Christmas, highlights the growing inequality in the United States.  That’s what I want to talk about today.  Sapolsky emphasizes the biological effects of inequality, in particular being in the “wrong” rank.  The question then arises, what gets defined as “wrong”?  And how do people experience that? 

Bob Herbert’s piece offers us plenty of clues that a more sustained research program would surely substantiate (along with discovering the interesting surprises and twists that make all the difference, but that don’t always make it into newspaper editorials).  We can think about the problem in two ways.  Sapolsky pointed to psychosocial stress as mediating the impact of inequality on biology.  Blakey highlights the actual reality of inequality as also shaping biological outcomes.  Both are important. 

On the psychosocial side, Herbert mentions “Wall Streeters are high-fiving and ordering up record shipments of Champagne and caviar,” and normal people see this sort of stuff all the time—it’s on television, in magazines, part of our everyday gossip.  We know there are people who are enjoying these extraordinary “rich” lives, and we know that it’s not us. 

Herbert also writes, “[Working families’] belief in that mythical dream that has sustained so many generations for so long is fading faster than sunlight on a December afternoon.”  Based on a poll by Lake Research Partners, “nearly 50 percent held the exceedingly gloomy view that today’s children would be ‘worse off’ when the time comes for them to enter the world of work and raise their own families.”  Here we return to a theme explored in the post on Everyday Design, that not having a sense of control and that one can work to make a positive change is frustrating and stressful. 
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Nice to be noticed

Our little youngster, Neuroanthropology, just got a mention at Savage Minds. It’s not entirely unexpected as I posted an announcement on Culture Matters, the applied anthropology blog sponsored by Macquarie University’s Department of Anthropology. It was a bit of PR and may have been premature, but I think that Daniel Lende has taken to posting such high quality stuff that I didn’t want to wait any longer.

Many thanks to Christopher Kelty for the notice and the encouragement for the type of intellectual project it represents. Kelty offers encouragement, but he also gently points out some of the challenges of the vertigiousness inter-divisional collaboration that something like ‘neuroanthropology’ demands. He writes:

There is room for a new kind of medical and bio-cultural anthropology for people willing to connect—- though it does depend on finding the brain scientists willing to meet the cultural scientists halfway, which is no mean feat.

To which I would merely add that finding the anthropologists amenable to this collaboration is also no mean feat, especially judging from the savaging I just received for a submission on the topic to a major anthropology journal. Admittedly, the article needed a bit of work, but I don’t think it was EIGHT REVIEWS worth of bad.

Having Savage Minds notice you, however, if you’re an anthropology blog, is a bit like getting a cool older kid’s attention at school, so I’m pretty happy about that. More soon, too, on my recent presentation on equilibrium as a culturally variable dynamic neuro-behavioural system.

Again, I’d encourage those who are interested in participating to contact me directly. greg.downey@scmp.mq.edu.au

Everyday Design Continued

John Tierney, whose New York Times article I commented on in the post Neuroanthropology and Everyday Day Design, wrote me a kind email (Thanks, John!) to say: 

Thanks… for writing about Donald Norman so perceptively. I enjoyed your advice to neuroanthropologists, and the cautionary words from the commenter [who was actually me] who bought one of those digital frames anyway. BTW, Don Norman was looking at design and other factors in our shopping excursion — one of the frames he liked better was partly due to the esthetics (it was a natural wood instead of black). As he and your commenter realize, people often buy something without testing it out and so the buttons really don’t matter from a marketing standpoint. Although with Amazon comments and other feedback, maybe usability will become more of a factor.

 Tierney continued discussing Donald Norman’s work in this article “Smart Elevators, Dumb People.”  The new smart elevators work without buttons inside the elevator; rather, you push a button in the lobby and are directed to the elevator that will take you (and others) to that specific floor.  In other words, instead of each elevator making all stops, the new smart elevators attempt to group people going to the same floor into the same elevator.  Faster service, energy saved… 

Norman again points to two important aspects that concern anthropology—“years and years of experience” and a “clash of cultures.”  For the experiential side, Tierney points to people reaching for buttons that are not there and using the door opening and the floor shown as the signal to get off.  On the one hand, people had to learn that the button pushing happened outside the elevators; on the other, the engineers had to adapt their technology so that the floor being displayed and the floor where the doors opened actually matched.  This point about experience, signals, and old habits highlights a realm that cultural anthropology does not explore much because its main causal explanations are things like “inequality” or “culture” or “discourse/ideology.”  A lot of life is simply about years and years of experience, and in many ways, the things that interest anthropologists empirically build on these everyday things.  Cognitive neuroscience—Donald Norman is a cognitive scientist—offers us a wealth of ways to think about and examine these sorts of habits and cues and behaviors in ways that will ultimately enrich out understanding of what “culture” means and does. 

For the clash of cultures, Norman indicates the conflict in our everyday spaces (like elevators) between people used to one way of doing things with the engineers trying to foist another way of doing things on us everyday mortals.  Something that culture does well is to make things less confusing—culture imposes an order on the world that is quite different from what all other animals do (even if there are shared roots to culture way back in primate evolution).  But we humans are still animals, and we often diligently follow the dictates of our cultural environment.  Sometimes less confusion doesn’t mean more enlightenment, it just means more efficiency and better execution.  From an evolutionary point of view, that will often be enough.

‘How Your Mood Affects Your Health’

One of my preferred news compilation websites, Alternet.org, just published a piece, originally from the UK Independent (I believe), on the relation of emotions, personal interactions, and similar ‘moods’ on health. Anastasia Stephens, in the article, ‘How Your Mood Affects Your Health,’ runs through in very cursory fashion a whole host of research on the effects of things like laughing, stress, arguments, and crying on the human immune systems, healing, and the like.

The article has a lot of fun little research summaries, unfortunately, without links to the actual research reports or anything deeper about the studies. But there’s warnings about how arguing affects healing:

A half-hour argument with your lover can also slow your body’s ability to heal by at least a day. In couples who regularly argue, that healing time is doubled again. Researchers at Ohio State University discovered this by testing married couples with a suction device that created tiny blisters on their arm. When couples were then asked to talk about an area of disagreement that provoked strong emotions, the wounds took around 40 per cent longer to heal. This response, say researchers, was caused by a surge in cytokines — immune-molecules that trigger inflammation. Chronic high levels of these are linked to arthritis, diabetes, heart-disease and cancer.

Or another personal favorite:

Scientists at the University of California have discovered that laughter relaxes tense muscles, reduces production of stress-causing hormones, lowers blood pressure, and helps increase oxygen absorption in the blood. Cardiologists at the University of Maryland Medical Center found laughing can actually reduce the risk of heart attack by curbing unwanted stress, which can destroy the protective lining of blood vessels. A good giggle also burns calories since it’s possible to move 400 muscles of the body when laughing. Some researchers estimate that laughing 100 times offers an aerobic workout equivalent to 10 minutes on a rowing machine or 15 minutes on an exercise bike.

Continue reading “‘How Your Mood Affects Your Health’”

On Stress-Part Two-Blakey

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchBy Daniel Lende 

The other night, my two year old daughter complained with a sleepy vehemence, then turned to my wife for comfort (yes, we are co-sleepers!).  She had been sick, unable to sleep well, and she sought out her mother for comfort and soothing.  It wasn’t that my daughter was physically stressed, but that her little mind seemed to get ahead of herself.  The terrible things bothering her?  Suddenly they are all right because of Mamá. 

What does this have to do with the fight-or-flight reaction?  Very little.  But anyone who’s tried to deal with a screaming baby knows that such a thing is very stressful for everyone involved.  And that’s the point.  Stress does not sit so easily into the category we imagine for it.  When my daughter screams, I feel my blood pressure rise and a lack of control if I am unable to soothe her.  Alternatively, calming her calms me.  These sorts of experiences do not fit easily into the stressor/stress reaction dichotomy covered in yesterday’s post on Robert Sapolsky.  But I had not really thought about it that way until I recently read the work of Michael Blakey, professor of anthropology at William & Mary. 

In his chapter “Beyond European Enlightenment,” Blakey opens with a discussion of how naturalism leads into ecological and evolutionary “explanations” that lie explicitly outside the social realm as well as to sexual, racial and genetic determinism (“natural” causes or differences, hence we just have to accept the present state of affairs).  Blakey is not against the documenting of human variation that good ecological or human biology research can highlight, say between a certain type of environment and a certain body type.  However, he is against this approach becoming the core focus of a discipline (say, biological anthropology) and quite aware of the dangers that the projection of biological explanations into the social realm plays in the communications and politics of a public anthropology. 

As he writes, “Naturalism as it informs empirical methods shows the human element in data analysis as contaminating, deviating from ultimate truth.  Culture, therefore, becomes a thing to be purged (or denied) in apprehension of legitimate truth (382).”  He sees the logical extension of such a view as: “The proper order of human life according to this view is to be found outside human society.  Whether the method is belief in gospel or systematic evidence, religion and natural science obtain an allure of being able to reveal knowledge from beyond human agency (382).”  

Continue reading “On Stress-Part Two-Blakey”